Over the past number of years Cloud Computing has become a major buzzword in the IT industry. People have various definitions of what cloud computing actually is or how it’s implemented into a service making the term rather cloudy itself.

Today cloud computing or at least cloud services is becoming a house-hold name thanks to Microsoft and now Sony with their new PS3 game saves feature.

What is cloud computing?

Without getting in-depth or too technical what Cloud Computing is the simplified meaning of the term is that data is not stored in one location but is split across multiple servers and in most cases in different data centres.

It’s likely you have been using a service that has been built on the cloud and didn’t even realise it. Take Google’s Gmail as an example, all your emails are not stored on a single server but are stored on multiple servers dotted across the world which is perfect example of cloud computing.

So why use the cloud?

Reliability! A service that is built on cloud computing is going to be more reliable than a service held in one location. For example, if a server at Google (or even a data centre in their case) goes offline it will have little or no impact on its service. This is why Google experiences very little outages with their websites or services. The gaming industry now needs to be pushed in this direction for a better online gaming experience.

So now I’ve gotten that out of the way here is what I think of the recent news about the PS3 saves to the cloud.

Subscribers get 150MB for their online storage which does not seem to be a lot but it’s enough for 1,000 data files as Sony claims.

Fair play to Sony for implementing the service but it’s not something that I would interested in at all.

I don’t find my game saves to be “critical data” and it won’t make a major impact to my life or business if I lose them. My 250GB PS3 Hard Drive and 1TB external drive is sufficient for storing my game saves so the only time I’ll need the online storage service is if my house burns down destroying both my hard drives and their backups.

Don’t get caught up on the hype, there really isn’t anything special here that’s going to change your gaming experience even if Sony claims its in the cloud.